


The Unmourned

by weakinteraction



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Gen, Holidays, Trick or Treat: Chocolate Box
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-22 14:37:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12483900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: The Doctor follows clues across all of time and space to find an old adversary and an older friend.





	The Unmourned

**Author's Note:**

  * For [robotraces](https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotraces/gifts).



The Doctor walked across the glass plain to the ruined castle, his umbrella hitting the ground rhythmically with each stride, each tick counting down the time until the cumulative radiation exposure would trigger a regeneration.

He had time. He would not rush.

Each step followed inevitably on from the other, just as had the steps that led him to this ruined place.

The anachronistic materials in an ancient Venusian artefact, dug up by researchers in the 51st Century whose expedition had been haunted by a gestalt entity drawn from the atavistic sides of their own psyches.

The self-destructive meme implanted in the noösphere of a weakly godlike posthuman civilisation that inhabited/embodied the Small Magellanic Cloud in the 73rd Segment of Time.

The violence in Victorian London that had turned out to have its origins in a butcher's shop where the "mystery ingredient" in the pies turned out to be battlebeasts from Beta Pavonis, smuggled through an unstable dimensional portal.

And on, across the galaxies and through the eons, a convoluted breadcrumb trail leading here: the Unmourned Mausoleum. The last remaining monument to a civilisation that had been born, flourished, and destroyed itself in a remote star system without ever impacting on the wider universe. The star and its protoplanetary disc had been flung out of its parent galaxy during a merger, becoming so totally isolated in the process that when planets had formed and life had eventually evolved, nothing that had ever happened here -- no discovery, no disaster, no triumph, no tragedy -- had ever affected any other part of the timeline. The inhabitants had been born, lived, lived, and died -- in their billions, in the final conflagration -- and yet none of it, in the final analysis, _mattered_.

The perfect place to be the hidden centre to a web of manipulation that the Doctor had had to painstakingly unpick, bit by bit, to avoid catastrophic disruption to the timelines.

The Doctor reached the blast doors, squat and triple-reinforced, set within the much larger doors of the castle the command post had been built within. As the headquarters of the faction that had begun the final war, this place had had both the best protection -- even prototype energy shields, as well as architecture designed to withstand a direct hit -- and the least bombardment, with their first strike taking out much of the other power blocs' ability to retaliate. The people inside might even have survived, for a time.

He had raised his umbrella, ready to knock on the door with the handle, when the ancient mechanisms within began to clank and hiss, seemingly of their own accord.

The Doctor looked around for the most likely location for the camera -- the building's own monitoring systems would have long since fallen into disrepair, but its new inhabitant had access to technology they would never have dreamed of -- and doffed his hat.

Lights sputtered on in the corridor ahead. One fizzed and burned out immediately, and the others dimmed for a moment, but then recovered.

"I'm coming into your parlour, don't worry," the Doctor said to the place where he imagined the camera to be, and began to walk across the concrete floor with the same measured strides that he had used to cross the glass outside.

Eventually, he reached an internal door that, if anything, was even more shielded than the external one. Slowly, it too began to open.

When the door finally opened, the room revealed beyond was enormous. Sparkling blue holographic volumes -- restored from, or at least in keeping with, the original computer networks, but now showing complex 11-dimensional schematics -- blossomed like night flowers all around the space, casting an eerie light on the disused workstations and the huge central table around which the terrible decision had been made. At its head, all alone in the room, sat a figure that suddenly seemed to the Doctor to be small, diminished, a shadow of the man he had once called friend.

Above all else, the Master looked _older_. His hair was grey, his beard thinning. If he had still been in a Time Lord body, the Doctor would have said it must have been a millennium of subjective time for the Master since their last meeting, but there was no way to tell how long it had really been. But his eyes still danced with intelligence and activity.

"Of course," the Doctor said, "you would set up shop in the Command and Control Centre."

The Master chuckled, but it turned into a cough. "So, you found me."

"I rather think you wanted to be found," the Doctor said. He studied the closest hologram, the intricate way in which one event after another was bound together. He traced the links from one volume to another. There was far more here than the patterns he had already spotted, already unpicked. There would be yet more work to do, when he left this place.

"Do you like it?"

"Yes, yes, very ingenious, in its own twisted way," the Doctor said, moving onto yet another holographic volume.

"I was rather hoping you'd have one of those bright young things of yours with you," the Master said. "I have to admit, I was looking forward to hearing you explain my schemes to them."

"I travel alone now," the Doctor said simply, shutting the door inside his mind before the memories could emerge from it.

"A pity," the Master said. "I have been waiting such a long time." When the Doctor didn't reply, he went on, "Do you know what I've been wondering, while I waited?"

"I'm sure you're going to tell me," the Doctor said distractedly, peering into the next display. He stretched out his hand into the hologram, as though to pick up one of the more elaborate nexus points, but it couldn't cope with resolving itself around the disruption, so he withdrew it again.

"I've been wondering why you never came here," the Master said.

"Hmm?"

"This place would be perfect for your meddling. You could rewrite this planet's history into a utopian paradise without worrying about any consequences for the continuum. When I first arrived, I almost expected to find that you already had. But no, it was exactly as it was supposed to be: the blasted husk of a destroyed planet, a civilisation snuffed out in what was really little more than its infancy."

"Free will is important," the Doctor said.

"Then surely you shouldn't meddle at all?" the Master said. "Let the poor creatures of the universe destroy themselves -- destroy each other -- in the name of self-determination. It would at least be a nobler justification for inaction than the Time Lords' official position."

The Doctor stopped then. "Stopping conquest and possession and ... dictatorship--" he fixed the Master with his gaze, then "--isn't denying free will, it's enabling it."

"And how can it be, that a planet got itself into _this_ state without one or more of those applying? You could fix it all with a few judiciously chosen interventions. And best of all, no one would care!" The Master coughed again. "But, do you know, I wonder if perhaps that's the problem: _no one would care_. You wouldn't have anyone to show off to about it."

"Well," the Doctor said, forcing himself to maintain a mild tone. "Maybe it's on my to do list."

"From what I hear, you've been working through your to do list with some haste, recently."

"And what if I have?"

"Perhaps we are not so different, after all," the Master said.

"You know, you're right; all this isn't like you at all. All of this--" He wheeled round, pointing with his umbrella to one nexus point after another in the holograms. "It's nothing more than a four-dimensional sculpture, really. Or a ... treasure hunt across time and space."

"If it's not like me, then perhaps you will admit that it is a little like _you_?" the Master said, with an amused chuckle. "This latest you, at least."

"You used to want power," the Doctor said, ignoring him. "Take over a planet. Steal an 'ultimate' weapon or two. Blackmail the entire universe with the fact of its inevitable irreversible decline."

"Those--"

"I haven't finished," the Doctor said, darkening his tone. "Then you just wanted to live. Take over a body. Steal one or other 'cosmic' power source to keep it going. Blackmail the High Council into giving you a new regeneration cycle."

"Infidelitous ingrates," the Master complained. "I did all that they asked!" He started to cough, spluttering into his gloved hand. When he recovered, he added, "You know you would never have escaped from the Death Zone if not for me."

"But now what are you doing? What's the point of all this?" He gestured through the holograms, deliberately disrupting them to make his point. "What do you _gain_ by it?"

The Master looked up at him with a slowly broadening smile. "It got your attention, didn't it?"

"And is that really all you wanted?" When no answer came, the Doctor added, "You realise that it's not just my attention you'll have drawn."

"If you hadn't come here of your own volition, they would have found a way to twist your arm," the Master said. "The net effect is the same."

"I'm not talking about _them_."

The Master's look was a question.

"Things are changing. The _future_ is changing."

The Master waved his hand dismissively. "The future is always changing. That's what makes it the future."

"That's not what I mean and you know it. You must have felt it, even here." Other powers were flexing their temporal muscles now, and the Time Lords seemed unable -- or unwilling -- to prevent it. The Imperial Daleks he had met in 1963 had time technology far more sophisticated than the crude time corridors he had become used to encountering. The memories of his first incarnation's struggles against Daleks with fully transcendental time machines troubled him. What if they had come from the relative future? What if he had been drawn into a time war centuries ago, without even knowing it? Or what if it was something else, something he didn't even know about yet?

"What if I have?"

"What's really going on here?" the Doctor said. "Tell me the truth, for once in your life."

"Oh, Doctor, I've always been honest with you. Well, if you don't count the disguises, the subterfuges, all the myriad little tricks of the trade. But that's just the way the game is played; in the end, I've always told you the most important truths. You just didn't like what you heard."

"Tell me now, and I'll believe you," the Doctor offered.

"Do you remember what you said to me, on the Cheetah Planet?" And for just a moment, his eyes seemed to flash yellow. Did the infection still persist, somewhere in there? Or was it just a trick of the light? "'If we fight like animals, we die like animals'." The Master laughed. "And you were right. But I want to die like a Time Lord."

"And so you are fighting me like a Time Lord," the Doctor said. He tried to hide his disappointment that it was such a small thing. 

"You're right, you know," the Master said, and his voice suddenly sounded haunted. "I do know what's coming. Not the shape of it, not the details. But the fact that _something_ is coming, we all know that. Something out there in the shadows, a threat that we don't even recognise as a threat yet. Even the Cardinals in the Panopticon have felt the foundations of their world shake." The Master laughed, his old swagger returning for a moment. "Well, admittedly, that one might have been me."

"I'm not going to kill you," the Doctor said simply.

"But you could," the Master said. "A staser bolt ... ah, but no, you don't like guns, do you? But you could twist the blade into my hearts, or unpick my timeline so that I never happened at all. That's more your current style, I think."

"I could never do that," the Doctor said.

"Coward," the Master said, accusingly.

"Oh, it could be done, I'm sure," the Doctor said. "But not by _me_. Our paths are far too closely intertwined; the risk of paradox would be too great."

"You finally admit that you need me," the Master said, chuckle turning into a prolonged cough, great racking convulsions.

He really was dying, the Doctor realised with a shock. All the cosmic power he'd imbibed, all the nanites and symbiotes and infestations he'd hosted, couldn't hold his body together forever. Or, perhaps, they had finally taken their toll.

When the coughing fit finally subsided, the Master looked up at the Doctor with haunted eyes. "If you won't kill me, then someone else will."

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of," the Doctor said. The possibilities were nearly endless.

"I have a request." The Master began to cough again, but managed to get it under control. "I want it to be you, who collects my remains."

"Don't talk like this," the Doctor said, urgently. "Come back with me, to the TARDIS--"

"And then what? Besides, you travel alone now," the Master said. "You said so yourself."

"It doesn't have to end like this."

"Oh, Doctor. It was _always_ going to end like this." With a sudden movement that belied the apparent fragility of his body, the Master brought out the Tissue Compression Eliminator from his pocket and held it out. "Now leave. You might not be willing to kill me, but surely Borusa trained you too well in logic for you to fall into the fallacy of affirming the consequent."

He was still walking out of the castle when he heard the wheezing, groaning sound of the Master's TARDIS departing.

* * *

The Doctor walked across the grass plain to the restored castle in the twilight.

A child playing hopscotch -- a game that they should never have known, but that he had accidentally introduced into their culture on a previous adjustment -- abandoned the game and ran over.

"Mister, Mister," she said, prehensile hair waving excitedly. "Are you going to the opening?"

"I was thinking about it," the Doctor said. "Do you think I should?"

The child nodded vigorously. "They say it's going to be the best Peace Day celebration ever."

"Well, then," the Doctor said. "I probably should."

He had jumped forward fifty years, to the commemoration of the day on which the warring factions that had been posed to destroy all life on the planet had, at the eleventh hour, seen sense and committed to the path of peace, putting their weapons beyond use and re-establishing the philosophical foundations of their society. With a little help from a strange visitor who might or might not have repeatedly nipped out of the negotiations to change the timeline to make the negotiators more amenable. They were calling it the End of War, a claim the Doctor had heard far too many times to believe in wholeheartedly. But maybe here, it would actually manage to be true.

"Have you heard what they're saying about the stars?" the child went on.

"Ah," the Doctor said. An ambiguous peace dividend: the ability to channel research into basic science revealing to them their true place in the universe. "What are they saying about the stars?"

"They've been looking really hard, and they say that every star we can see is really a big star, with millions of smaller stars inside it," she said. "Isn't that amazing?"

The Doctor broke into a broad smile. He hadn't wanted to admit his real reason for his reluctance to intervene here to the Master, but now that same reason was being transformed by the alchemy of a child's perspective into a source of wonder.

"Do you think we'll ever go there?" the child asked.

And there it was. Even absent a cataclysmic end, these people were still doomed to an existence of utter loneliness, unable to ever experience the thrill of exploration, before eventually succumbing, as all life must, to entropy.

The Doctor looked at the impossibly distant stars, each of which was a galaxy in its own right. "No, I don't. But sometimes it's enough, just to live a little longer."

The child looked confused at that, but said, "Happy Peace Day."

"Happy Peace Day," the Doctor said, doffing his hat. Then he raised his eyes back to the skies, imagining that somewhere in the impossible distance his old friend could hear him. "Happy Peace Day," he said again.


End file.
